Hermeneutics — From Greek hermēneúein (to interpret), a term traditionally associated with Hermes, the messenger of the gods charged with conveying their messages to mortals. It designates the theory and practice of interpretation, initially aimed at the exegesis of sacred and legal texts and later elevated to a philosophical method of universal scope. At first hermeneutics supplied rules for fixing the sense of obscure passages; Schleiermacher (19th c.) reformulated it as a general art of understanding (Verstehen) that seeks to reconstruct the author’s intention and requires the movement of the hermeneutic circle — grasping the whole through its parts and the parts through the whole. Dilthey turned it into the methodological foundation of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), opposing the understanding proper to the humanities to the causal explanation (Erklären) of the natural sciences. The ontological turn came with Heidegger, who in Being and Time (1927) made understanding not a method but an existential structure of Dasein: to interpret is the way the human being is always already thrown into the world. Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960) radicalised this thesis: all understanding is conditioned by “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) and unfolds as a “fusion of horizons” between interpreter and text, always mediated by tradition and language. Thus reading an ancient law is not recovering a fixed meaning but applying it to the present situation. Paul Ricoeur articulates hermeneutics and phenomenology in a “long route” passing through the analysis of symbols, metaphors, and narratives, bringing philosophical interpretation closer to the sciences of the text.
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